the neuroscience of friendship

Scientists can protect who your friends are just by looking at how your brains respond to the same video. So, this is a social network of all of the students in a graduate program. So, each dot is a person and there's a line between them. If they both mutually reported that they hang out socially. — This is kind of a crazy thing to do within your — crazy thing to do. — So, then they had 42 students go through an fMRI brain scan while watching a series of video clips. The description is a comedy skit in which grown men play teenage girls disgusted by things around them. — An astronaut discusses witnessing the effects of climate change from space. — It really showed me that this is a planetary system. — The key brain regions that drove this effect were kind of involved in things like attention and interpretation and emotion. — But what the study didn't determine is whether people became friends because their minds are similar or whether their minds became similar because they were friends. So, there's a newer study that did brain scans before the social networks formed, and that's the study that we're going to be discussing at our science paper book club on May 4th. — And you don't have to read the paper if you're just curious about this topic. We're going to like really get into it. The whole point is to make these really dense academic writings accessible to everybody. — And we'll have the lead author joining us to talk about what determines who becomes and stays friends. But you know what else this made me realize is that if our responses to video clips reveal who we would be good friends with, then platforms like Tik Tok have all the data in the world to connect people to those who they would be friends with in real life. — Oh my gosh. — Instead, we're kind of like just in these lonely parallel feeds. — It's against their business model to have people go outside, — right?